In 2007, more than 200 teams set out on an ambitious automotive undertaking. The X Prize Foundation announced it would create a $10-million competition open to anyone who could build a safe, mass-producible car that achieved 100 miles per gallon equivalent. AutoblogGreen followed the competition in real time, but the grueling three-year adventure has now been recounted in fascinating detail by author Jason Fagone in Ingenious, a new book on sale this month.

'Ingenious,' a new book, shows promise and peril of auto inudstry in fascinating detail

At the turn of last century, the earliest automakers pioneered the use of electric batteries for powering their newfangled cars. Internal combustion engines appeared but a blip on the road to efficiency.

Last night, Sunday, August 5, at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, CA, lots of people hugged and held their arms high to celebrate a ballsy, historic achievement in space travel. Ten years after the project was launched, NASA's huge Curiosity rover touched down safely on Mars, and the odds of this finishing successfully were quite thin. The 1-ton rover needed to be helped onto the planet's surface by a rocket-powered sky crane, which then flew off to crash land a safe distance away a

On the heels of Audi unveiling its Urban Concept, Opel showing off its RAK e concept and Volkswagen pulling the sheets off its Nils concept at the 2011 Frankfurt Motor Show, Edison2 has revealed an electric version of the X-Prize-winning Very Light Car.

While the Automotive X Prize's raison d'être is to give out money to the best high-mileage vehicles and business plans in the $10 million contest, as the saying goes, it takes money to give out money. To that end, the AXP announced today that it has received $5.5 million from the U.S. Department of Energy. The funding is part of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act and is intended to "to support the X PRIZE Foundation's work to inspire a new generation of energy efficient vehicles" t

The Progressive Insurance Automotive X Prize has has a number of teams drop out recently (e.g., the Avion and the LincVolt), but the competition is not slowing down. Next week, in New York City, the AXP will formally announce the names of the teams that are "moving ahead in the competition." To tease us, the AXP has listed five of those teams in today's pre-announcement announcement: AMP Motorworks, which converts Saturn Skys to all-electric drive; Commuter Cars, which makes the Tango; Optamotiv

The road to actually compete in the Progressive Automotive X Prize is a tough one. We've been following the competition since well before the official Day One, and we can't quite understand the difference between all of the different levels that a team can be considered. What we do know is that the AXP's judges are hard at work these days looking over the submissions of the Registered Teams, deciding which vehicles will be allowed to continue as part of the Qualified Teams. After the initial pas

With the New York Auto Show just around the corner, representatives from the Progressive Automotive X Prize will use the occasion and will mark the one-year anniversary of the official start of the competition by revealing the list of all registered teams, possibly as early as tomorrow. 80 teams turned in their paperwork just in time to beat the submission deadline in late February, out of 120 total. We'll see who made the list soon enough.

The Automotive X Prize's deadline for registration has passed and now we get to wait and see just who's going to be actually participating in the upcoming high-mileage competition. The organizers say that the last few days and hours before the deadline were "an absolute firestorm of phone calls, emails, and overnight packages." From the looks of it, there might be 100 teams actually registered (40 already committed and then more than 50 applications that arrived in the last week), but somewhere

We were skeptical of the technology claims, but didn't take the time to double-check another of the "facts" stated in a recent (and now ended) eBay auction for a Chrysler LeBaron convertible. It turns out that while BrocktonEnergyLLC used "Experimental X-prize" in the name of the auction, the folks over at the Progressive Automotive X Prize never heard of him. The X Prize's Bethann Buddenbaum writes:

It wasn't all flashy new cars during the media days at the Detroit Auto Show last week. During our time in Cobo Hall, we sat down with Cristin Lindsay, senior director of the Progressive Auto X Prize, to talk about where the AXP is right now. For those keeping track, we are about half-way between the official kick-off at the New York Auto Show last year and the expected start of the stage races this fall. We know that the AXP is looking for more formal participation from the major automakers, bu